They are among the scientists awarded MacArthur Foundation Genius awards on Tuesday that comes with a $500,000, no-strings-attached grant to put toward the work of their choice.

Provided by the MacArthur Foundation, here are a few videos of scientists discussing their work. Terry Plank talks here about her work studying “how tectonic processes generate the most destructive natural disasters on our planet.”

And in the video below, Guyon describes a lens he invented that changes how light is distributed in a telescope:

“This new technique allows us to actually use a telescope smaller than we thought we needed to take images of planets around other stars,” he said. “And more importantly, once we have identified such planets, to study them, to look at their colors, do they have oceans, atmosphere, land clouds. So this technique is really a breakthrough.”